American Life in Poetry: Column 530

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Poets often do their best work when they’re telling us about something they’ve seen without stepping into the poem and talking about themselves. Here’s a lovely poem of observation by Terri Kirby Erickson, who lives in North Carolina.

Hospital Parking Lot

Headscarf fluttering in the wind, stockings hanging loose on her vein-roped legs, an old woman clings to her husband

as if he were the last tree standing in a storm, though he is not the strong one.

His skin is translucent—more like a window than a shade. Without a shirt and coat,

we could see his lungs swell and shrink, his heart skip. But he has offered her his arm, and for sixty years, she has taken it.